Rishard Khan

Re­porter

rishard.khan@guardian.co.tt

Cy­ber­at­tacks oc­cur in T&T at a rate of ap­prox­i­mate­ly 168 every minute, which un­der­scores the crit­i­cal need for au­thor­i­ties to bol­ster their re­sponse, es­pe­cial­ly with the in­creased pub­lic ac­cess to AI tech­nol­o­gy.

This alarm­ing sta­tis­tic came from ex­ec­u­tive chair­man of Amal­ga­mat­ed Se­cu­ri­ty Ser­vices Lim­it­ed Dr Michael Aboud who said gov­ern­ment in­fra­struc­ture, health­care, and large con­glom­er­ates are bear­ing the brunt of these at­tacks.

“We are ex­pe­ri­enc­ing ran­somware with­in Trinidad and To­ba­go. While you may not nec­es­sar­i­ly hear about it in the pub­lic do­main and peo­ple, in an ef­fort to pro­tect their brand and so on, may not nec­es­sar­i­ly be talk­ing about it but it has hap­pened and it con­tin­ues to hap­pen,” he said.

Aboud said his fig­ures came from the com­pa­ny’s own records in col­lab­o­ra­tion with that of oth­er part­ners.

One of the coun­try’s largest con­glom­er­ates fell vic­tim to a ran­somware at­tack in what was de­scribed as the largest Caribbean da­ta breach dump to date. In Oc­to­ber, the Hive Ran­somware group dumped 87,550 fold­ers and 704,047 cor­po­rate files al­leged­ly be­long­ing to Massy Stores.

Aboud said ran­somware at­tacks are like­ly to be tied to the transna­tion­al crimes cur­rent­ly plagu­ing the re­gion.

“The fun­da­men­tal tech­nol­o­gy that al­lows, for ex­am­ple, ran­somware to oc­cur would be based on the codes and stuff. We don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly have that ex­per­tise, so we are align­ing with some in­ter­na­tion­al crim­i­nal syn­di­cate to fa­cil­i­tate this av­enue,” he said.

Chief busi­ness de­vel­op­ment of­fi­cer at US-based Om­nisys­tems Inc, Gary Walk­er, be­lieves theft of per­son­al in­for­ma­tion through cy­ber at­tacks is one of the biggest threats to cy­ber­se­cu­ri­ty in the re­gion and can orig­i­nate from any coun­try.

“(This can be) quite dis­rup­tive. Par­tic­u­lar­ly be­cause the threat is com­ing from many dif­fer­ent places, from many dif­fer­ent ac­tors, not just pro­fes­sion­al ac­tors but al­so ac­tors who are work­ing with crim­i­nal­i­ty at the core of what they want to do,” he said.

Though not ran­somware, the long chain of in­ter­na­tion­al links in cy­ber at­tacks was wit­nessed al­most a month ago when an emailed bomb threat forced the evac­u­a­tion of schools na­tion­wide. The serv­er used in that threat was based in Ger­many and the ‘re­solve host’ of the email was sit­u­at­ed in Cyprus, po­lice said. Two Vir­tu­al Pri­vate Net­works (VPN), lo­cat­ed in Switzer­land and Pana­ma were used to fur­ther mask the iden­ti­ty of the ori­gin of the email.

Aboud, who de­scribed T&T’s pre­pared­ness against cy­ber at­tacks as “very very low”, said the sit­u­a­tion war­rants clos­er at­ten­tion.

“It’s go­ing to have a sig­nif­i­cant im­pact on our com­mer­cial busi­ness­es and the risks they are fac­ing,” he said.

AE Tac­ti­cal Lim­it­ed man­ag­ing di­rec­tor Luke Hadeed agreed that cy­ber threats are a grow­ing con­cern.

“We utilise mo­bile phones, com­put­er tech­nol­o­gy, with the ad­vent of per­son­al da­ta and in­for­ma­tion and us re­ly­ing more (on it)—cy­ber is a mas­sive, mas­sive con­cern for cor­po­rate Trinidad and busi­ness­es through­out and like­wise gov­ern­ments,” he said.

Adding to the al­ready com­plex dig­i­tal threat land­scape, Aboud said, is the emer­gence of AI tech­nol­o­gy.

“AI is a whole new ball game that is go­ing to change sig­nif­i­cant­ly what is go­ing to take place,” he said.

The tech­nol­o­gy has moved be­yond sim­ply gen­er­at­ing text and can be used to cre­ate, mu­sic, videos, and pic­tures among oth­er things.

“We can­not be sleep­ing on it be­cause it is here and it will on­ly get worse,” he said.

Walk­er ex­plained that AI can be par­tic­u­lar­ly help­ful to crim­i­nals be­cause of its abil­i­ty to sift through a large chunk of in­for­ma­tion in a mat­ter of sec­onds, fa­cil­i­tat­ing a faster hit and get­away while in­creas­ing the dif­fi­cul­ty to trace. How­ev­er, while the tech­nol­o­gy pos­es a threat, it could al­so be har­nessed for law en­force­ment.

“AI can make us smarter, can get us more da­ta quick­er. It al­so gives us the abil­i­ty to be very re­peat­able. We can re­peat things quick­er and we can share da­ta quick­er,” he said.

“Pro­cess­ing da­ta has been the biggest chal­lenge of cops for many many years. I’ve worked cas­es where I’ve had to man­u­al­ly go through files for months just to find one piece of ev­i­dence I can use to iden­ti­fy an ac­tu­al tar­get. I’ve tak­en that en­tire sit­u­a­tion and repli­cat­ed it with to­day’s tech­nol­o­gy and the same ex­er­cise takes 30 to 40 sec­onds.”

Hadeed said AI’s threat could al­so be less doom and gloom, fo­cus­ing on copy­right in­fringe­ments through the var­i­ous art func­tions it can per­form.

Hadeed be­lieves lo­cal au­thor­i­ties have the tools to com­bat the threat but ad­mits there is a gap that “al­ways needs to be closed.”